Internet Search and Elections in Established and Challenged Democracies

Tag Archives: U.S.

A couple of weeks ago we presented some of the Voter Ecology Project’s preliminary findings at the ECREA Communication and Democracy annual symposium in Munich, Germany. Among the many questions raised in the Q&A session, one went right at the heart of the challenges with which we have been getting to grips in the past couple of months, which led us to be wary of applying traditional political communication research methods in the context of a new media ecology. In particular, someone asked how exactly we were planning to “disentangle” what Internet users were interested in because they had seen it on TV from what traditional news media covered by responding to a rise in popular demand for information on a certain topic or event. At first, this may sound like a chicken and egg question. However, this is not really an issue of causation, but rather one that speaks to the challenge of mapping and understanding increasingly complex informational trajectories in a context in which online content and that of ‘legacy’ media are ever more intertwined.

Since writing about the need to develop a citizen-centric approach to study electoral information flows in our first blog update, we spent quite a bit of time dealing with methodological riddles. Having hypothesised the existence of a “search agenda” populated by issues that reflect the “true” interests of Internet users, a key problem was to find a viable system to map and compare that set of issues against those that dominated news media coverage of electoral affairs and official campaign messages respectively. As media scholars, our first intuition was to use content analysis to produce a comprehensive overview of the news content and campaign literature surrounding elections in each of the countries under scrutiny (the UK, the U.S., Italy and Egypt). However, we soon realised that this would have been not only extremely time-consuming and resource-intensive, but would have constituted also a potentially distortive application of old research frameworks in a new context.

As it is often the case in social science research, a breakthrough occurred when we realised that in fact we were asking the wrong question, starting from what was ‘old’ rather than what was ‘new’ in the informational environment that typically surrounds electoral contests. This newly found awareness inspired us to ‘reverse’ the traditional research process, using Google Trends data to identify the moments in which demand for online political information was particularly intense and then carry out an in-depth analysis of these informational ‘junctures.’ For example, we found that, although British Internet users were relatively uninterested in Gordon Brown during the campaign for the UK 2010 general election, search levels for information related to the then prime minister and Labour party leader suddenly exploded towards the end of April to then decline just as sharply a couple of days later. As it turned out, this search peak coincided with the ‘bigot-gate’ episode, which was arguably a watershed moment in the 2010 UK general election campaign and some described as one of the most over-reported stories of that year. Similarly, search levels for information related to Mitt Romney went through the roof in conjunction with the ‘binders full of women’ gaffe he made during the second televised debate in which he and Barack Obama took part during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign.

Such extreme search patterns invited further investigation to expose in full the informational transactions that surrounded each of these sharp rises in voter interest in political content. Indeed, shining the spotlight on such intensely mediated political events while at the same time hypothesising the existence of a specific – but not necessarily independent – ‘search agenda’ may sound rather paradoxical. However, a true contradiction in terms would arise here only if one were to mistake this for the arrival point in the research process, when in fact it is quite the opposite. Identifying the moments in which citizens are most likely to be interested in political information with Google Trends constitutes a first level of investigation that ought to be followed by a number of other questions. In this framework, finding that the same episodes had generated a vast amount of interest across both online and traditional mass media did not necessarily mean that each of these events also occupied exactly the same position on the ‘search agenda’ as it did on the agenda of traditional news media. Rather, as researchers and innovators our job is to go beyond the tip of the iceberg, reaching underwater to identify the deep ramifications of key socio-political events.

Thus, for each of the episodes listed above as well as for others, we are in the process of asking what role(s) they played and how long they featured in the agendas of search engine users, traditional news media, and campaign managers respectively. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, we are also testing whether voters used such seemingly trivial episodes as ‘springboards’ to complete “thematic leaps” (that is, to start researching or spreading information on a policy issue connected to the events in question). Although this is still very much work in progress, it has been interesting to see how Google Trends provides opportunities for researchers to revisit events that have become crystallised in the academic literature on the mass media and elections with a view to finding different angles from which to interpret them.

To browse the complete series of presentation slides from the ECREA Communication and Democracy 2013 conference click here:

Joe Trippi, campaign manager for U.S. presidential hopeful Howard Dean in 2003-4, once explained that in the era of online campaigns “What you’ve got to do, is you have to have two-way communication. It’s the bond, to be able to talk to each other about you, that is important.” At the time, such words may have sounded like heresy to those used to traditional “top-down” campaigns. Ten years on, they make instead for basic textbook remarks on democratic electioneering. Campaigning has come a staggeringly long way in a very short amount of time. Politicians want citizens to get in touch through online media because it helps them build a winning campaign. Yet, can we be sure that citizens are equally as eager to hear from politicians as Trippi’s remarks seem to imply? Couldn’t it rather be that today’s voters, with so many online resources at their disposal, are building their own “election agenda” instead of relying on “managed” campaign information? After all, one could be forgiven for thinking that being able to track Barack Obama’s favourite dining spots in real time can only prelude to a better-than-ever-informed citizenry.

The idea of emancipated voters who make the most of their technological proficiency to break free of electoral information hegemony is a captivating one, but the truth is that we still don’t quite know whether this actually happens. In fact, doubts on the pluralising effects of online campaigning started to emerge in the very early days of Web 2.0 technology. Shockingly for cyber-enthusiasts, scholars such as Philip Howard (2006) pointed out that by “redlining some constituents and communities and then narrowcasting political content, hypermedia campaigns diminish the amount of shared text in the public sphere” (p. 183). In other words, personalised information feeds and tailored messages would restrict, not enhance, pluralism and participation. From a pragmatic point of view, this is perhaps not as much as a surprise as it may seem at first. As Kreiss (2012) explained in his work on the Dean and Obama campaigns, “campaigns simply are not designed to be the training grounds of radical democratic participation that many desire” (p. 183). Thus, “many supporters not only accept but embrace this, given […] the objective is to defeat rivals, not remake democracy” (ibid.). That said, our knowledge of information flows at election times remains confined to what Lilleker and Vedel (2013) have termed “supply-side studies,” which focus on campaign messages rather than asking where else citizens get their information from before heading to the polls.

To use a metaphor, it’s time for researchers to turn the pyramid upside down. That means, start by asking how voters navigate and interact with the virtually limitless “sea” of online information, as well as mapping those practices against campaign messages and traditional news coverage of election issues more broadly. To this effect, some have analysed how people use Twitter before, during and after televised debates and current affairs programs. That has yielded some interesting results, but at the same time it’s a bit like putting the cart before the horse or preparing the icing before even looking for a cake recipe. Despite increasing in numbers, being particularly vocal and arguably influential, Twitter users remain a minority among internet users. What, then, about the broader picture? Some have sounded internet users through traditional surveys, but one has to wonder whether there are better ways of capturing informational practices in the digital age. We believe that a good place to start in this process could be mapping user-interests using Google Trends: What types of information do voters search for in times of elections? How do they search? Are they guided by established mass media templates and official campaign messages, or capitalise on the relative freedom provided by search engines to create their own “search agenda”? And finally, what role does search occupy in the nascent “new media ecology”?

As search contends with email to be the most popular online activity in the U.S. and remains the primary way through which British users access information on the internet, acquiring a detailed overview of search patterns would ensure as representative a base as possible for comparing the interests of online citizens to the agendas of both politicians and traditional mass media outlets, which can be mapped using more traditional methods. For example, Google Trends suggests that British internet users became increasingly interested in knowing about a “hung parliament” as the 2010 general election approached despite politicians doing their best to avoid talking about this issue.

Was it traditional mass media coverage that inspired voters to search for information on this possible scenario, or were they rather using search to remedy the lack of information on this issue in mainstream channels? Indeed, unravelling this type of issues is bound to throw up some important methodological challenges, as I discussed recently in a dedicated paper, and require an inductive approach, as search trends are likely to be uncovered by testing for a wide range of potentially relevant keywords rather than merely anticipated on the basis of theoretical assumptions. That said, this promises to be an exciting journey in which, once overarching trends as well as standout search “events” have been identified through Google Trends, multiple methods can be employed to map how key messages are generated, shared, and re-framed across different media platforms in times of elections in a process that could be conceptualised as “nexus analysis.”